On Friday the 5th and Saturday the 6th September I visited the beautiful O’Reilly’s resort for a special lunar event that was being held worldwide to entice the general community to go outside and look up at nearest celestial neighbour…the Moon. On Friday evening, I gave a talk in the theatre on how important the Moon is to our planet and showed many of my images of the different phases of the Moon as it orbits the Earth. There are also some spectacular occurrences that are produced when the Moon, Earth and Sun are in a perfect alignment and here I showed some beautiful images of lunar eclipses and two rare solar eclipses that occurred in Australia in 2012 & 2013. After the presentation we all went outside to see the real 10-day-old Moon through my large telescope. I also showed the constellations in the sky with a rare view of two planets Saturn and Mars in the constellation of Libra. The sky was lovely and clear but it was very cold! On Saturday the 6th September InOMN night, we revisited the Moon again as some new people had joined us and then I gave a presentation on our Starry Starry night where I showed everyone how they could take beautiful images of the Moon and the night sky with little more than a camera set up on a tripod. For the more adventurous that owned a telescope I helped explain the attachments and camera settings that would be needed to take some wonderful images of the Moon and other celestial objects with there telescopes. After the presentation we went outside to look at the Moon again just to see how much more detail was displayed on the terminator line from the previous night…this time we had some high cirrus cloud and a bitterly cold wind blowing, when you are at 3000 ft on top of a mountain this wind can be very very cold…but everyone was brave and stayed outside long enough to look at our beautiful Moon. We then all retired to the warm theatre room to talk about all things astronomical and enjoyed the hot drinks and star cookies that the chef made for us; everyone enjoyed their lunar star party on top of the mountain for InOMN 2014, thank you to the O’Reilly’s Rainforest Resort for hosting this special event for all there guests and visitors. If you’ve attended an InOMN event please go to the InOMN web site and download your participation certificate at:http://www.lpi.usra.edu/observethemoonnight/materials/2014/certificate.pdfhttp://observethemoonnight.org/ If you would love to visit this most amazing natural area at Lamington National Park then O’Reilly’s Rainforest Retreat is the perfect place to stay at: http://www.oreillys.com.au/ If you love camping there’s the beautiful Green Mountains Campground with all amenities that's nearby to O’Reilly’s on the mountain, please go to the Queensland National Parks and Wildlife web site where you’ll find out all about this most remarkable place in South East Queensland.http://www.nprsr.qld.gov.au/parks/lamington/about.html Happy stargazing until next time….Noeleen Lowndes :-)

Everyone enjoying looking at the Moon on Friday evening...it was very cold!

Nick with the Yummy lunar cookies that the chef made us :-)

~ Lunar Cookies ~

Everyone enjoying the lunar presentations on Saturday evening for InOMN